My shtick has always been that the Internet is not a media business, that does not however mean that it is not an effective, potentially devastating competitor for our attention and resources. This piece from the Guardian spells it out in stark detail/

I have just spent two days at another media conference. This one was organised by the Financial Times, and if the Guardian conference was from Venus, the FT's was from Mars.

The topics under discussion were no less interesting or important, but they were much more scary. The broadcasting world described at this conference was a brutal one, characterised by a collapsing audience share, an unending advertising slump, attrition from competing platforms and, worst of all, an increasingly hostile and uninterested audience. Now, things are all about survival.

The Shifted Librarian usually has some good stuff when it comes to thinking about the way information moves around. This posting however, has some fascinating thoughts about authentication and subscription sharing.
The question becomes, whether I would need to go into the library in order to view material from an online subscription taken out by the library. The implication is that I would not. After all, as long as I have a valid library card, and am therefore entitled to read the publication "via the library" why would the publisher care about my location when I read the material? But then, if my location doesn't matter, where is the business case for the subscription model?